preview

Unimpaired And Unattended Attention

Decent Essays

The fact that stimuli from the contralesional field was able to get through, brings up the idea of attended and unattended messages. In a healthy functioning brain, an attended message is the stimuli that a person focuses and concentrates their attention on. The unattended message is the stimuli that is largely or if not totally ignored. These two types of messages are what make up the concept of selective attention. With the case of impaired EN and SV, they were able to take in the unattended, or what was thought to be totally ignored, stimuli of the spiders occurring in their left field of space. They did not simply move their head to achieve this. Each kept their visual field fixated on a cross in the center of the screen as stimuli was …show more content…

Other uncommonly spoken words, like “garage,” may have a lower level of activation and making its way into attention. This same type of reasoning can be applied with Vuilleumier & Schwartz’s visual experiment. EN and SV were more prone on picking up on the threatening stimuli, in this case, spider figures than they did figures that resembled a flower. Through the lens of Treisman, the spider figure would have a high threshold of activation, while the flower figures would have a lower threshold of activation.
Stimuluses that are more prone to capturing out attention could also be described as being involuntary, meaning they capture our attention without us consciously making an effort to attend to them. An involuntary stimulus could be anything from a loud sound or a huge figure that appears in someone’s visual environment. With the case of spiders, someone that has arachnophobia or simply feels threatened by them, may have a response to them involuntarily. Vuilleumier & Schwartz even note in their findings to how emotional value may affect attention. The emotional response that the spider figures evoke may be so high, that is causes them to be processed without attentional awareness by EN and SV. The attentional response here almost occurs immediately, illustrating bottom-up processing. Focusing on Mrs. S in Slack’s

Get Access